I've been playing with this idea for a while now, trying different approaches, building proof of concept samples, throwing them away and starting over. Here is scenario I going after: your client asks you to build web application and, when you done, there is a little extra - "can you also add a blog to our website please? The PR people say it might come in handy and we want our product managers to engage by posting news etc. Shouldn't be too hard, right?" Well, you can add Wordpress or alike and call it a day, but what if they want it truly integrated, not another external application but part of website you just built? That would be a challenge. For example, here is 21 step (!) guide on integrating BlogEngine.Net into your application. And this is a challenge I was trying to tackle by creating Blogifier. More...

There are plenty services and plugins that let you add social share buttons, downside is they usually trying to be all things for all people. So you can end up with complex solution to a very simple problem. For example, I just want Twitter and Facebook share buttons and not really interesting in anything else. I want it to be as light, clean and simple as possible. How hard it is to do it manually? Fortunately, not that difficult and I'll try to describe how to do it in this post. More...

In application where you publish things, published time seems simple. I write post at 12 pm, hit “publish” and all I want is my post saved with that 12 pm time-stamp. How hard it can be, right? Wrong, which I found the hard way trying to fix issues with publish time in relatively simple application. So I made this cheat sheet, or rather note, to help straighten things up. More...

Lots of people use Google Analytics to track user statistics on the blog. If you one of them, there is another tool you might be interesting in – something called “Woopra”. Although Analytics are cool, Woopra excels in real-time tracking – it literally shows what is going on your blog right now. Just take a look at the picture below – you can see how many people are browsing through your blog, what pages they on, searches used to bring them in, referring sites and more. And it is all real-time, you can see people coming and leaving. Pretty fun stuff. More...